I hate this type of argument. I'm sorry, but I'm going to rant for a few seconds.

Talking about how one standard is "faster" than another isCOMPLETELY USELESS.
You are all brainwashed by marketing departments into turning off your brains.

Think.... please, think about this a little bit.

What device, in this entire planet, that can be hooked up to a USB2 or FireWire port (old or new) can actually transmit data fast enough to reach that bandwidth? What can actually saturate that data bus?

Anyone have an answer? Maybe a professional level digital video camera (like used to film the latest star wars. Not something you pick up at a store.) Maybe a gigantic hardware shark array from IBM? Those use hardware raid and read multiple disks simultaneously. Very efficient and very expensive.

But certainly not a $1000 non-professional camera. Yes, the pro digital cameras (1 series) have firewire, but they don't saturate the data bus either. It is there because they have done market research and found that their customers have firewire and want to use it with their cameras. The reason to use USB2 or FireWire should have nothing to do with bandwidth. It should have to do with availability, price, support, ease of use... the stuff that usually really matters any ways.

Now, let's have another pop quiz. I put a hard disk (western digital 250GB special edition drive. Yes, the nice fast one.) into an external drive enclosure which supports firewire and USB2 though. Through which interface will I be able to read data faster? Anyone? The answer is firewire! I have seen this result time and time again. Firewire might be a "slower" protocol (by a trivial amount) but it is more efficient. And it is better suited to storage devices. USB2 isn't (it handles them just fine, but it's emphasis was on keeping it cheap not maximizing efficiency. Motherboard makers don't want an expensive-to-implement interface. They want cheap and good. But cheap comes first. I should know, I made devices imbedded into TVs for about 5 years.)

But the end result is that either can be badly implemented in either the hardware, firmware (in the camera) or the driver. I could be that most good USB2 CF readers are faster than using Firewire on the camera.

But a good Firewire reader beats a USB2 CF reader. Don't believe me? Check out this well done compairson:http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/mul...id=7-6191-6217
It is, admittedly, a bit old now. But unless the reader takes advantage of special protocols (like the new Sandisk readers do with their new Extreme III cards) good firewire cards seem to beat USB2 readers.

Eric by any chance did you get out of bed the wrong side today? very usefull info though! no need to SHOUT, it might be a good idea in future not to presume that everyone has your level of knowledge on any given topic. in the meantime you will have to just suffer us fools gladly:-)

Actually, I had a great day. I got to see my first wild snowy owls ever, and we got to see two. I'm going to post pictures of them in the wildlife section later tonight.

While I agree that I wasn't exactly polite, I have to shoot this argument down so many times it annoys me. You have a brain. You showed it by knowing the rated BPS of the two standards and your knowledge of the EOS 1 cameras. Yet you choose not to use it to think about what those numbers practically mean. It's the practical side which guides you to purchase the proper thing. We need to convince the marketing people on this planet to treat us like we have a brain. Not just repeating numbers and claiming A is better than B. The more we do that, the more marketing people will treat us like idots and feed us numbers. We have to look at information and understand it. Use the understanding, and not the numbers, to guide our choices.

&lt;snip. I had an wonderful political anology, but I deleted it. This isn't a political forum.>

It's like the ratings on the throughput of the various ATA disk standards (ATA-66, ATA-100, ATA-133 and more.) No disk drive can saturate the ATA bus and they haven't been able to for 2 or 3 improvements now. So unless you do fancy stuff with your machine (RAID-0 your disks and burn a CD maybe?) you won't come close to using up all the available bandwidth. So saying that a hard disk that supports ATA133 is inherently better than an MB with ATA100 is just wrong. It's the same logic as with FireWire & USB2.